Category: Science

Over at The Daily Beast, I have a new piece on how technology influences religion, particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence and transhumanism (“The New Religions Obsessed with A.I.”). Check it out.

“How far should we integrate human physiology with technology? What do we do with self-aware androids—like Blade Runner’s replicants—and self-aware supercomputers? Or the merging of our brains with them? If Ray Kurzweil’s famous singularity—a future in which the exponential growth of technology turns into a runaway train—becomes a reality, does religion have something to offer in response?”

It’s been almost two years since I last wrote for HuffPost and a little longer for the science section, but I have a piece up this week about an interesting study I recently read. “There But for the Grace of God: Counterfactuals Influence Religious Belief and Images of the Divine” is in this month’s Social Psychological and Personality Science. Want to know more about the research, click to my article at HuffPost below.

In this new study (“There But for the Grace of God: Counterfactuals Influence Religious Belief and Images of the Divine”), published in this month’s Social Psychological and Personality Science, authors Anneke Buffone (University of Pennsylvania), and Shira Gabriel and Michael Poulin (State University of New York at Buffalo), found that religious faith was increased in participants when they were asked to deliberately consider the “it could be worse” scenario.